A developmental study of automatic word processing in a picture classification task.

Second-grade children, third-grade children, and adults judged whether pictures were members of a positive or negative memory set while trying to ignore irrelevant words printed inside the pictures. There were 3 types of picture-word relation. In 1 condition, the words corresponded to the pictures. In a second condition, the pictures and words were incongruent, but the words corresponded to the correct response (e.g., with dog and horse the positive set pictures, a picture of a dog containing the word "horse"). In the third condition, the pictures and words were incongruent and corresponded to conflicting responses. For all 3 subject groups, the type of picture-word relation reliably affected response latencies, indicating that subjects automatically processed the irrelevant printed words.     

Memory development and neurophysiology: accomplishments and limitations

The review of Teyler and Fountain offers developmental psychologists an update on the status of neurophysiological theorizing and findings related to memory and learning. Recent findings of LTP and of localization of different types of memory in different brain areas have potential for enriching our understanding of memory development. However, we note several limitations in Teyler and Fountain's presentation in that they do not: distinguish between learning and memory, nor between storage and retrieval; address the role of knowledge-based or top-down influences in memory and learning; employ concepts that can accommodate such developmental phenomena as stages in the hierarchical reorganization of memory. We conclude that even when the age-old search for the "engram" is accomplished, these issues will remain, and that different levels of neural modeling will be required to accommodate them. It is important for developmental psychologists and neuroscientists to maintain communication for the purpose of mutual refinement of models as their knowledge bases continue to grow.     

Expectation and anticipation of dynamic visual events by 3.5-month-old babies

We report an investigation of the development of visual expectancies in 3.5-month-old infants. One of the infant's eyes was videorecorded as the infant watched a series of slides that were presented noncontingent on behavior. Babies were presented an alternating and an irregular series of 30 slides with a 700-msec onset duration separated by an interstimulus interval (ISI). The ISI for the alternating series was 1,100 msec, whereas the slides for the irregular series were separated by 900, 1,100, or 1,300 msec, randomly ordered. One-half of the babies saw the irregular series first, and one-half saw the regular series first. Babies in both groups provided evidence that they developed expectations for the visual events in the alternating series. Their reaction times (RTs) declined significantly from 3-5 "baseline" presentations, and their RTs were reliably faster during the alternating than the irregular series. Additionally, babies in the alternating-late group had significantly more stimulus anticipations during the alternating than during the irregular series. These findings indicate that 3.5-month-olds can detect regularity in a spatiotemporal series, will develop expectancies for events in the series, and will act on the basis of those expectancies even when those actions have no effect on the stimulus events. We believe that infants are motivated to develop expectations for noncontrollable spatiotemporal events, because these expectations permit them to bring their visual behavior under partial internal control.     

Infant visual scanning of two- and three-dimensional forms

2- and 3-dimensional forms affected 4- and 8-week-old infant visual behavior differently, 4-week-old infants fixated a recessed 3-dimensional form more than a 2-dimensional form but did not scan it differently. 8-week-old infants did not look more at 1 stimulus than another but scanned a raised 3-dimensional form differently than a 2-dimensional equivalent. For all stimuli and both age groups, there was a relation between attractiveness of stimuli and how they were scanned; babies who were most attracted to stimuli inspected them with the smallest eye movements.     

Automatic processing of word meaning: intralingual and interlingual interference

Automatic processing of word meaning was studied in bilingual children and children in various stages of second-language acquisition in 2 experiments. A picture-word interference task was used. The children named outlined pictures as rapidly as possible while attempting to ignore distractor words printed inside the pictures' borders. For children proficient in the 2 languages (Experiment 1), the printed distractors interfered with naming on both intralingual trials, for which the distractor and naming language were the same, and on interlingual trials, for which they were different. The pattern of interference across 6 levels of name-distractor relation was similar for the intralingual and interlingual conditions and indicated that at least part of the interference occurred at a semantic level. For children who were in various phases of learning a second language (Experiment 2), second-language words were automatically processed to the level of meaning early in the course of second-language reading instruction. As was found for the more proficient groups, both the pattern and the amount of interlingual interference matched that for intralingual interference. The results question whether an "input switch" operates for bilingual word processing.